I’ve thought long and hard about how to address this thread after seeing the conversation so far. I’ll do the best I can.

Ever since I was given the opportunity to work on BuddyPress full time I’ve put every ounce of energy I have into the project. It has gone from nothing – literally fifteen lines of code to something that powers a number of large sites and a whole array of smaller ones. The community has sprung up since then and has grown fast, but it would not exist first without something that people enjoy using and want to discuss.

That has always been my number one priority, build something that people want to use. Without that we have nothing and all the work around the project is in vain. I am not a trained project manager, but up until now I’ve done my best to help the community flourish and feel part of the process.

Now, yes, I haven’t been working as much on BuddyPress for the past three months – anyone using Trac will notice that. I’m no longer spending all my time developing the next version of BuddyPress. I’m working on some features for WordPress.com, helping out with other tasks around WordPress along with continuing to develop the project. The hope is that some of the features I work on for WordPress.com can merge there way back into BuddyPress in future versions or as separate plugins.

The issue we have, and the whole reason behind this thread is that I’m still far too large of a percentage of BuddyPress as a whole. When I slow down or have other priorities the whole project suffers. It should not be like this, the community should not look to me as the final word or the only bringer of direction or progression. If I’m not around for a while BuddyPress should continue to flourish and move forward. JJJ is doing his best to help balance this, but he is only one guy, and a busy one.

To quote a past line from a certain Mr Mullenweg “the best way to dig a hole is to grab a shovel and start digging”. Discussion is great, but to see any change we need action. If you want a new feature or something changed, write a patch. Submit it to Trac, keep consistently writing patches, answering tickets and fixing bugs. I guarantee you will end up with commit access. Right now we have only 10% of tickets with patches, that’s not even close to enough.

If you hate the new site (I agree it’s a mess) then design some mockups, write some HTML wireframes, tell me how much it sucks and your plans to change it. Start a community discussion, but with the goal of a plan of action. I am more than willing to provide access to people who want to get stuck in, but endless forgotten lists of what needs to be improved will not change things.

If you want to write posts for the BuddyPress blog then start writing them, they will be published. If you want to have your say on the direction of the project as a whole then show up and ask your questions at the BuddyPress meetings bi-weekly (there has been a serious lack of questions lately, why?).

Action, action, action. There are many people in the community doing a great job, but if we’re going to reduce the dependency on the core devs then we need more people to step up and start digging.

No need to panic, everything is fine. JJJ is working hard on 1.2.5 and I’m still working towards 1.3 at a slower pace as my time is split in a few areas. I’m talking about soccer on Twitter because the world cup is on, and there’s more to life than code.

Not a plugin actually, but someone could turn it into one. It’s actually quite simple, you just need to include the following code in your theme wherever you want the map to appear. You will need a profile field called “Location”. You will also need a Google Maps API key.

I did it with just a template. Copy and paste the members, groups, forums, and activity loops into a new template file. Add the parameter ‘search_terms=’ . esc_html( $_GET ) to each of the loops and then create a new WordPress page called search and assign the template file to it. Then just pass ?f=searchterms to the URL and bob’s your uncle.

While I can respect the effort, I can’t see a reason to pay $79 for it when there’s a free version available. Most of the people coming from Ning are those who don’t want to pay to upgrade in the first place.

I don’t think http requests to Gravatar qualify the statement “BP is extremely inefficient”. If you don’t want the extra requests the filter the Gravatars out. This is nothing to do with making the “core rock solid”.

Can you not record your activity items with a new “type” and then use the “action=[typename]” filter in the loop to filter on only that type? Also, in the previous thread, editing the JS is a bad idea, you should be able to pass the extra information via the “extras” parameter in the AJAX request. You’ll need to set this in your own plugin JS. This needs to be documented, but there are a couple of plugins doing it – I think bp-links is.

In one sentence I would describe BuddyPress as: “Social networking in a box. An easy way to start your own niche social network”.

Lots of other social network tools try to define themselves as a do-it-all platforms that can be manipulated in all manner of ways, but then they don’t work so well out of the box or without some extensive configuration. Even though BP is also highly extensible, I’ve always thought the primary focus should be providing something that the non-techies can work with without much time investment. This is pretty much the same philosophy as WordPress.